Cultural Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20 Punk and feminism in Indonesia Jim Donaghey To cite this article: Jim Donaghey (2020): Punk and feminism in Indonesia, Cultural Studies To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2020.1844262 Published online: 24 Nov 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcus20 CULTURAL STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2020.1844262 Punk and feminism in Indonesia Jim Donaghey * School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK ABSTRACT A strong feminist strand has run through punk since its earliest incarnations, but, because punk scenes are inevitably affected by their wider social contexts, the influences of sexism and patriarchy must be continually (re)negotiated – feminist punk interventions are therefore a key aspect of contemporary ‘global punk’. This deliberate and conscious feminist interventionism is a key aspect of punk in Indonesia too, recursively taking its cues from ‘punk history itself’. Feminist punk interventions in Indonesia include feminist zines, women-centric bands, explicitly feminist gigs and festivals, communication and support networks of punk women, and anarcha-feminist ‘info-house’ initiatives. These interventions are necessary because, as elsewhere in the world, sexism is part of the lived experience for punk women in Indonesia. Patriarchal repression is acute in wider Indonesian society, and, despite the rhetoric of equality and opposition to oppression, these sexist norms are reproduced in the punk scene in the form of homosocial gender division, marginalization of women, derision of feminist initiatives, sexual objectification, and sexual assault. The influence of morally conservative fundamentalist Islam in Indonesia also shapes expressions of sexism in the punk scene. Drawing on three periods of ethnographic research (2012, 2015, 2018), as well as key secondary sources such as the Ini Scene Kami Juga! (This Is Our Scene Too!) documentary film (2016), and ongoing dialogue with women in Indonesia’s punk scenes, this article considers the influence of feminist interventions in punk. Whilst feminist objectives are limited to transforming their immediate punk scene, and though they face continued sexism within the scene and concerted repression from the state and from religious groups, these initiatives represent a significant political/cultural platform for feminism in wider Indonesian society. KEYWORDS Punk; Indonesia; feminism; sexism; intervention; anarchism Introduction *CONTENT NOTE* – Participants recount experiences and effects of physical sexual assault including detail of assaults themselves in the section entitled accordingly. All interviewee names are pseudonyms, and all interviewees self- identify as women unless otherwise stated. CONTACT Jim Donaghey [email protected] *Present address: School of Communication and Media, Ulster University, Coleraine, Northern Ireland. © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 J. DONAGHEY Punk in Indonesia has been a focus for numerous researchers since the 1990s, but women have never been the main feature of those analyses. The experience of punk women in Indonesia highlights sexism within that scene, contributing to ongoing discussions around sexism in punk, but also speaks to the everyday experience of patriarchy in Indonesia, repression of punk in Indonesia, and the influence of feminist interventions within the punk scene and in wider society. This article overviews the relationship between punk and feminism, then discusses various manifestations of sexism in the punk scene in Indonesia, as well as the relationship between religion and sexism, before considering feminist interventions in the punk scene, their aims, and potential influence. As I will discuss in detail, whilst recognizing that women face oppression in Indonesia, and highlighting that the feminist movement is actively repressed, it is relevant to acknowledge that the motivations for this repression are fre- quently rooted in morally conservative religion. It is even more important to avoid the trap identified by Adriany et al. (2017, pp. 289–290, emphasis added) of treating ‘women in the Global South … as a singular and mono- lithic group’, nor to assert that ‘Muslim women are all oppressed’, nor that ‘non-Western women … are always … subordinate and … [have] no agency at all’. As Spivak (2000) asserts, they do not need to be saved by feminists from the ‘Global North’. As a white cis-gendered man (albeit from a peripheral and colonized ‘Western’ context), and especially as a white man working within the ‘ivory tower’ of academia, positionality and ethical considerations come immediately to the fore. I situate myself as an ‘insider’ within the ‘global punk’ scene, but I am clearly ‘outside’ the perspective of women in Indonesia, whether punk or not, so asking people to relive emotional trauma to produce an academic article risks exploitation. The anarchist tradition of bottom-up, non-exploitative ethnographies is a starting point in efforts to decolonize research practices (Shome 2009), and methodologically this comes down to a dialogical approach, which ‘moves beyond simply “giving voice” to those being researched, to also involve those voices in the analysis and critique’ (Donaghey 2017, p. 310). This has hopefully been achieved through a strong emphasis on testimony from women punks in Indonesia, and by sharing drafts of this article with the respondents for comment, and explicitly including the option for retraction and veto. Much scholarship regurgitates the narrative of punk as a neatly defined cultural moment confined to the USA and UK in the mid-to-late 1970s – but even by the end of the 1970s punk had spread far beyond its Anglo- American birthing ponds, and this historical place-specific focus completely misses punk’s contemporary global manifestations. This is not to say that punk’s own global cultural flows are free from the effects of Anglo-American hegemony nor neo-colonial inequalities. Whilst the term ‘global punk’ speaks to the shared tropes, aesthetics, values and networks of an interconnected and CULTURAL STUDIES 3 mutually comprehensible international punk scene, it is not a homogenous descriptor – as Mackintosh et al. (2010, p. 15) put it, ‘there are always points and moments where “trans-local” communication fails’. This article will analyse ‘punk Indonesia’ in its own terms rather than hold it up for comparison with supposedly ‘authentic’ originator scenes in the USA or UK. However, this is not entirely a locally recursive definition, since the Indonesian punk scene does make sense of itself as part of a ‘global punk’ community. The shared ‘punk values’ of equality and resistance to oppression are pertinent examples of this global network. As Driscoll and Morris (2013,p.169)highlight,thisalso applies to culturally expressed conceptions of gender, that in their ‘particular- izing and universalizing tendencies, cut[] across transnational cultural flows and geopolitical boundary conventions alike’. This ‘trans-localism’ is one core feature that ties together this special issue – as it is framed in the introduction, ‘the concept of underground not only travels but is in fact recursively redefined’ (Valjakka), and this goes for punk and feminism as well. Punk can clearly be understood as an ‘underground’ movement, with ‘undergroundness’ held as a punk virtue: manifested in non- or anti-capitalist DIY production, distribution and networking (see, e.g. Holtzman et al. 2007), and in its self-consciously counter-cultural ethos informed by, and overlapping with, the anarchist movement. There have been rashes of corporate co-optation of punk, notably in the late 1970s (focused in the UK) and 1990s/early 2000s (largely in the USA), but whilst Indonesia arguably boasts the world’s largest punk scene, it is in some senses an especially ‘underground’ example in terms of DIY production, having had only a handful of bands sign to corporate labels,1 though the neo-colonial marginalization of the Indonesian punk scene is a factor here, and sponsorship of punk gigs by cigarette corporations is an ongoing problem (see Donaghey 2016). Indonesia is also the contemporary global context where punk is most actively repressed by state and para-state insti- tutions – this repression is in terms of punk’s outward contravention of Islamic doctrine and its perception as a Western import. So punk is driven underground in addition to its adoption of ‘undergroundness’ as a counter- cultural virtue. The feminist movement in Indonesia is also repressed by some groups, especially those associated with Islamic radicalism, which ‘perceives feminism as part of the Western hegemonic project’ and as ‘incompatible with Islamic teachings’ (Budiman 2008, pp. 73, 81). This is the same grounding that motiv- ates repression of punk, but, unlike punk, the mainstream feminist movement does not view ‘undergroundness’ as a virtue, and rather makes efforts to engage with the overlapping hegemonic forces of state and religion. Those who might be identified as ‘secular feminists’ (Karam 1998) point to Indone- sia’s adoption of the United Nation’s 1979 ‘Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women’ (signed by Indonesia in 1980 and 4 J. DONAGHEY ratified on 13 September